heartburn was: Re: travelling north

brunians at brunians.org · 06 Jun 2010, 03:15 · from 2010-June.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: brunians at brunians.org (brunians at brunians.org)
Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2010 23:15:50 -0400
Subject: (urth) heartburn was: Re:  travelling north
In-Reply-To: <4C0B101A.7040105 at sky.com>
References: <74ACEC927B2D43749BA167224C5AB711@jill>
	<4C08075B.2030400 at gmail.com>
	<AANLkTimI9nyYKzRkq7KE3YsaTbLa6SPSHCefLcldyR6x at mail.gmail.com>
	<4C0808EC.70806 at gmail.com> <4C080BDC.6050701 at gmail.com>
	<908091.30977.qm at web50703.mail.re2.yahoo.com>
	<AANLkTilPceNjSY0qPCHPuxP8fFkKEWlnma5eSdn69Usx at mail.gmail.com>
	<AANLkTimmMmnrRnDzERhYedHepcWey-YClNjv7b9SgAQu at mail.gmail.com>
	<4C0B101A.7040105 at sky.com>
Message-ID: <edeef2867de18c81894e1ca934ef79e3.squirrel at brunians.org>

Severian is a Descent of Christ.

.

> On 03/06/10 23:21, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
>> I think it's #2 that gives some people heartburn.
>>
> while commenting upon:
>
> On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 3:19 PM, John Watkins<john.watkins04 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> >  I think this has been covered, right?
>> >
>> >  1)  Obviously there are intentional parallels between Severian and
>> Jesus.
>> >  2)  Obviously Severian is not a literal stand-in for or equivalent to
>> Jesus.
>>
>
>
> Heartburn being an understatement no doubt! Regarding this, I feel that
> one of the most interesting passages of all occurs toward the end of
> 'The Urth of the New Sun'. [I know there are those who do not care for
> the sequel, but Wolfe wrote it also, to continue Severian's story, and
> so I feel it should at least be mentioned.]
>
> Severian has  traveled via the Corridors of Time to the ancient past of
> the Stone Town, where he has been taken by its people for (what appears
> to approximate to) a solar deity. To the extent that when he attempts
> seriously to leave, they kill him in order to keep him with them for
> ever. The whole referring back of course to the episode in *Conciliator*
> where we first get a heads up that Severian and the vivimancer
> Apu-Punchau are in some sense the same person (or
> Copenhagen-interpretation iterations of the same entity).
>
> Severian wakes up in Apu-Punchau's tomb, with the dead body of his
> 'other self' alongside him; he is baffled (as usual!) and frightened,
> but fortunately the white-clad figures of the Hierodules are there to
> explain things to him, or to help him construct his own explanation.
> During the course of this Ossipago offers to take all of them back to a
> 'better time'; an offer that is refused. Over the page Famulimus tells
> Severian that if they had allowed Ossipago to do this, he would have
> taken them back to an earlier time and 'That would not have been a
> better place for you, I think.' All this after the two non-machine
> Hierodules have prostrated themselves before the 'resurrected' Severian,
> 'the head of his  race and its savior'.
>
> One is left with supposition. Are we to gather that if so allowed,
> Ossipago would have transported the party 'back' in time (using
> Severian's perspective) to another tomb, and another Resurrection?
> Famulimus forbids it, thus preventing this final merging of timelines.
> On this interpretation, while Severian grows and evolves to become a
> kind of savior, the Powers do not allow that final identification of
> Severian with Christ himself. On the other hand, since Severian/the
> Sleeper is now  a practised wanderer of the Corridors of Time, nowhere
> is it excluded that somewhere along the line, with his further internal
> spiritual evolution perhaps, this identification could happen. Maybe
> Famulimus is saying 'Not right now' (that is, Severian's 'now'), rather
> than 'No way that's wrong and always will be.'
>>>>> On the other hand, the intended parallels do pile up. To once again
>>>>> quote Castle of the Otter/Castle of Days:
>>>>> "Many of us have read so often that he was a "humble carpenter"...The
>>>>> man who built the built the cross was as much a carpenter too...The
>>>>> only
>>>>> object we
>>>>> are specifically told he made was not a table or a chair, but a
>>>>> whip...Christ knew not only the pain of torture but the pain of being
>>>>> a
>>>>> torturer..."
>>>>>
>>>> That's a good one, which I'd forgotten.  But it doesn't mean Severian
>>>> is
>>>> like Christ or that he did for his universe what Wolfe believes Jesus
>>>> did
>>>> for ours.  Severian is far from perfect.
>>>>
>>>> Wolfe also points out a parallel to someone who was presumably not a
>>>> savior at all, the carpenter who made the cross.
>>>>
> Hmm. To veer off topic a little -  there is another writer - a devout
> Orthodox (big 'O') Christian - who has (to the best of my recollection)
> used exactly this last notion in writing of Christ himself. Nikos
> Kazantzakis in 'The Last Temptation of Christ' has Christ as an
> apprentice carpenter building crosses, instruments of torture and death,
> for the Occupying Power. (I will not comment on this; I'm just relaying
> the information.) Does the Guild of Seekers for Truth and Penitence have
> their apprentices help to build their 'apparatus'?
>
> It *is* off topic of course; but still, since it is many years since I
> read that book please correct me if I have remembered LTOC wrong.
>
> I don't think I have though - It's so unlikely I'd have invented this
> idea myself back then.
>
> regards
>
> JD
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net